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Dear readers, it has been quiet on this blog for 2 weeks now and it will stay quiet here over time

I moved the blog to another place on the web under a different name www.bluebeat.org. NoFishLeft will come back as a campaign against overfishing of our oceans and will soon be announced on the site of BlueBeat.org

BlueBeat.org is our ocean education initiative, a first start of an organization about and around every threat the ocean and us people living on this fast blue planet facing. We decided to switch to another name and website so we can slowly creating a better and more advanced, broad website around ocean education. WordPress blogs unfortunately have there limited.

2011 will be the year of the ocean!! let’s put ocean conservation on the agenda worldwide

Commercial whaling nearly wiped out every species of large whales in the 20th century. International whaling regulations were ignored or ineffective. As a result, many species remain endangered today.

In 1986 the International Whaling Commission established a moratorium on commercial whaling. Iceland, Norway, and Japan continue to defy the whaling ban. Since the moratorium began, these nations have killed over 25,000 more whales, including endangered species.

It is a difficult idea to fathom. But the science is clear: Unless we change the way we live, the Earth’s coral reefs will be utterly destroyed within our children’s lifetimes.

by j.e.n. veron

Over the past decades, there have dozens of articles in the media describing dire futures for coral reefs. In the 1960s and ‘70s, we were informed that many reefs were being consumed by a voracious coral predator, the crown-of-thorns starfish. In the 1980s and ‘90s, although these starfish still reared their thorny heads from time to time, the principal threats had moved on — to sediment runoff, nutrients, overfishing, and general habitat destruction.

For me, an Australian marine scientist who has spent the past 40 years working on reefs the world over, these threats were of real concern, but their implications were limited in time or in space or both. Although crown-of-thorns starfish can certainly devastate reefs, the impacts of sediments, nutrients and habitat loss have usually been of greater concern, and I have been repeatedly shocked by the destruction I have witnessed. However, nothing comes close to the devastation waiting in the wings at the moment.

Photo courtesy of J.E.N. Veron

Ribbon reefs have formed the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef for millions of years.

You may well feel that dire predictions about anything almost always turn out to be exaggerations. You may think there may be something in it to worry about, but it won’t be as bad as doomsayers like me are predicting. This view is understandable given that only a few decades ago I, myself, would have thought it ridiculous to imagine that reefs might have a limited lifespan on Earth as a consequence of human actions. It would have seemed preposterous that, for example, the Great Barrier Reef — the biggest structure ever made by life on Earth — could be mortally threatened by any present or foreseeable environmental change.

Yet here I am today, humbled to have spent the most productive scientific years of my life around the rich wonders of the underwater world, and utterly convinced that they will not be there for our children’s children to enjoy unless we drastically change our priorities and the way we live.

A decade ago, my increasing concern for the plight of reefs in the face of global temperature changes led me to start researching the effects of climate change on reefs, drawing on my experience in reef science, evolution, biodiversity, genetics, and conservation, as well as my profound interests in geology, palaeontology, and oceanography, not to mention the challenging task of understanding the climate science, geochemical processes, and ocean chemistry.

When I started researching my book, A Reef in Time: The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to End (Harvard, 2008), I knew that climate change was likely to have serious consequences for coral reefs. But the big picture that gradually emerged from my integration of these disparate disciplines left me shocked to the core.

In a long period of deep personal anguish, I turned to specialists in many different fields of science to find anything that might suggest a fault in my own conclusions. But in this quest I was depressingly unsuccessful. The bottom line remains: Science argues that coral reefs can indeed be utterly trashed in the lifetime of today’s children. That certainty is what motivates me to spread this message as clearly, and accurately, as I can.

So what are the issues? Most readers will know that there have been several major episodes of mass bleaching on major reef areas worldwide over the past 20 years. In the late-1980s when the first mass bleaching occurred, there was a great deal of concern among reef scientists and conservation organizations, but the phenomenon had no clear explanation. Since then, the number and frequency of mass bleachings have increased and sparked widespread research efforts.

Corals have an intimate symbiotic relationship with single-celled algae, zooxanthellae, which live in their cells and provide the photosynthetic fuel for them to grow and reefs to form. The research showed that this

‘Ecosystems can recover from all sorts of abuse, and coral reefs are no exception.’

relationship can be surprisingly fragile if corals are exposed to high light conditions at the same time as above-normal water temperatures, because the algae produce toxic levels of oxygen, and excessive levels of oxygen are toxic to most animal life. Under these conditions, corals must expel the zooxanthellae, bleach, and probably die or succumb to the toxin and definitely die. A tough choice, one they have not had to make at any time in their long genetic history.

Scientists have for the first time estimated the physical footprint of human activities on the deep seafloor of the North East Atlantic. The findings published in the journal PLoS ONE reveal that the area disturbed by bottom trawling commercial fishing fleets exceeds the combined physical footprint of other major human activities considered.

The deep seafloor covers approximately 60% of Earth’s surface, but only a tiny fraction of it has been studied to date. Yet as technology advances and resources from relatively shallow marine environments are depleted, human impacts on the deep seafloor are likely to increase.

“Information on the location and spatial extent of human activities affecting the deep-sea environment is crucial for conservation of seafloor ecosystems and for governance and sustainable management of the world’s oceans,” said Angela Benn of the National Oceanography Centre, who led the new study.

The researchers focused on the OSPAR maritime area of the North East Atlantic, where human activities are particularly intense. The area covers over eleven million square kilometres, about 75 percent of which is deeper than 200 metres, and includes important fishing grounds such as those of Hatton and Rockall.

Using available data for the year 2005, they mapped and estimated the spatial extent of intentional human activities occurring directly on the seafloor as well as structures and artefacts present on the seafloor resulting from past activities.

They looked exclusively at the physical footprint rather than the consequential ecological effects of disturbance, contamination and pollution, which are harder to ascertain. One difficulty that they faced was that of accessing data on human activities that was accurate, up to date and comprehensive, and in a suitable format for analysis.

“Some governments, public organisations and private companies were far more forthcoming with information than others,” explained Benn. “Significant improvements are needed in data collection and availability, and this requirement needs to be built into international conventions and treaties with a legal framework in place to ensure informed environmental management.”

Despite difficulties and various uncertainties, the researchers’ assessment suggests that, although now banned, previously dumped radioactive waste, munitions and chemical weapons together have the lowest physical footprint of the human activities considered, although they do not consider potential dispersal after leakage.

Non-fisheries marine scientific research also has a relatively small footprint, whereas those of fisheries marine scientific research, telecommunication cables and the oil and gas industry are moderate. However, even on the lowest estimates, the spatial extent of bottom trawling is at least ten times that for the other activities assessed, with a physical footprint greater than that of all the others combined.

The study estimated the total area of physical imprint in 2005 to be around 28,000 km2. However many human activities in the deep sea are concentrated in certain areas, particularly in shallower depths between 200 m and 1500 m, and in particular habitats which become disproportionally impacted. The OSPAR area comprises many different habitats each with different and diverse ecosystems. The percentage impact in each of these habitats would provide important information but unfortunately there is virtually no detailed seabed mapping to provide this information.

As demands drive human activities ever deeper the imprint will become more widespread. “Consequently,” argues Benn, “there needs to be a much greater understanding of the relative impacts of human activities on the deep seafloor, and in particular how these activities affect seafloor ecosystems and biodiversity.”

The world’s first identified ocean “dead zone”—a watery region where a combo of nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizer runoff creates monstrous algae blooms that kill off everything in the water—was discovered more than 40 years ago at the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico. Today, more than 400 dead zones are growing around the globe; the number has doubled every decade.

No fish can live in the dead zones where fertilizer-polluted rivers dump into the sea. (Photo: Ho New/Reuters)

All of the oceans, say the study authors, have numerous dead zones, with particular hotspots in the tropical South Pacific, off southeastern Australia and China, in the Gulf of Mexico and off Namibia, in the Bay of Bengal, in the Baltic and Black seas and in the South Atlantic. Essentially, the problem exists everywhere rivers meet the sea.

Each spring and summer, the original dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico grows to roughly the size of New Jersey, spanning the ocean from Mississippi to Texas. Nothing in its reach can grow. Around the world, dead zones range in size from one square mile to 27,000 square miles. All told, dead zones now cover nearly 100,000 square miles of ocean, an area larger than the state of Oregon.

Why the boom? A familiar trio of problems: overfishing, nutrient runoff, and climate change. Too many people live and pollute too close to the sea and take its biggest resource (fish) without pondering the consequences.

According to the Australian report, now is not the first time the oceans have died off: “Declining oxygen concentrations have played a major role in at least four or five mass extinction events.” Those were due to meteor strikes or booms in erupting volcanoes, which killed off 90 percent of life in the ocean.

The authors of the new report believe that a similar loss of life could occur in the next 100 years.

“Climate change is driving changes to water circulation—so winds, strange weather patterns, have a consequence for how the ocean turns over and aerates and so on, and it’s the winds which are delivering a lot of organic compounds into the deep sea.

“At the same time, we are putting a lot of fertilizer off coastlines, those sorts of things are incubating these deep water anoxic zones.”

This would be the first time that the ocean died due to man’s influence; as the ocean warms due to a fast-changing climate these low oxygen zones will move closer to the surface and spread out along the continental shelves.

“Ocean ecosystems are in a lot of trouble and it all bears the hallmarks of human interference,” says the study. “We are changing the way the Earth’s oceans work, shifting them to entirely new states, which we have not seen before.”

“It’s mucking around with the heart and lungs of the planet—that’s essentially what the oceans are, a huge respiratory system. We damage them, the consequences could be very serious.”

Last season, during the BP spill, that very first dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico swelled to near-record size. With all that crude polluting the Gulf, could the dead zone get any deader?

ScienceDaily (Dec. 2, 2010) — Earth has run out of room to expand fisheries, according to a new study led by University of British Columbia researchers that charts the systematic expansion of industrialized fisheries.

In collaboration with the National Geographic Society and published in the online journal PLoS ONE, the study is the first to measure the spatial expansion of global fisheries. It reveals that fisheries expanded at a rate of one million sq. kilometres per year from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s. The rate of expansion more than tripled in the 1980s and early 1990s — to roughly the size of Brazil’s Amazon rain forest every year.

Between 1950 and 2005, the spatial expansion of fisheries started from the coastal waters off the North Atlantic and Northwest Pacific, reached into the high seas and southward into the Southern Hemisphere at a rate of almost one degree latitude per year. It was accompanied by a nearly five-fold increase in catch, from 19 million tonnes in 1950, to a peak of 90 million tonnes in the late 1980s, and dropping to 87 million tonnes in 2005, according to the study.

“The decline of spatial expansion since the mid-1990s is not a reflection of successful conservation efforts but rather an indication that we’ve simply run out of room to expand fisheries,” says Wilf Swartz, a PhD student at UBC Fisheries Centre and lead author of the study.

Meanwhile, less than 0.1 per cent of the world’s oceans are designated as marine reserves that are closed to fishing.

“If people in Japan, Europe, and North America find themselves wondering how the markets are still filled with seafood, it’s in part because spatial expansion and trade makes up for overfishing and ‘fishing down the food chain’ in local waters,” says Swartz.

“While many people still view fisheries as a romantic, localized activity pursued by rugged individuals, the reality is that for decades now, numerous fisheries are corporate operations that take a mostly no-fish-left-behind approach to our oceans until there’s nowhere left to go,” says Daniel Pauly, co-author and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at UBC Fisheries Centre.

The researchers used a newly created measurement for the ecological footprint of fisheries that allows them to determine the combined impact of all marine fisheries and their rate of expansion. Known as SeafoodPrint, it quantifies the amount of “primary production” — the microscopic organisms and plants at the bottom of the marine food chain — required to produce any given amount of fish.

“This method allows us to truly gauge the impact of catching all types of fish, from large predators such as bluefin tuna to small fish such as sardines and anchovies,” says Pauly. “Because not all fish are created equal and neither is their impact on the sustainability of our ocean.”

“The era of great expansion has come to an end, and maintaining the current supply of wild fish sustainably is not possible,” says co-author and National Geographic Ocean Fellow Enric Sala. “The sooner we come to grips with it — similar to how society has recognized the effects of climate change — the sooner we can stop the downward spiral by creating stricter fisheries regulations and more marine reserves.”

The University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, in the College for Interdisciplinary Studies, undertakes research to restore fisheries, conserve aquatic life and rebuild ecosystems. It promotes multidisciplinary study of aquatic ecosystems and broad-based collaboration with maritime communities, government, NGOs and other partners. The UBC Fisheries Centre is recognized globally for its innovative and enterprising research, with its academics winning many accolades and awards. The Sea Around Us Project is funded in part by the Pew Environment Group. For more information, visit www.fisheries.ubc.ca and www.cfis.ubc.ca.

The National Geographic Society, the Waitt Foundation, the SEAlliance along with strategic government, private, academic and conservation partners including the TEDPrize, Google and IUCN, are beginning an action-oriented marine conservation initiative under the banner of “Mission Blue” that will increase global awareness of the urgent ocean crisis and help to reverse the decline in ocean health by inspiring people to care and act; reducing the impact of fishing; and promoting the creation of marine protected areas. For more information, go to www.iamtheocean.org.

Australian scientists fear the planet is on the brink of another mass extinction as ocean dead zones continue to grow in size and number.

More than 400 ocean dead zones – areas so low in oxygen that sea life cannot survive – have been reported by oceanographers around the world between 2000 and 2008.

That is compared with 300 in the 1990s and 120 in the 1980s.

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) and from the University of Queensland, says there is growing evidence that declining oxygen levels in the ocean have played a major role in at least four of the planet’s five mass extinctions.

“Until recently the best hypothesis for them was a meteor strike,” he said.

“So 65 million years ago they’ve got very good evidence … all the dinosaurs died because of smoke and stuff in the atmosphere from a meteor strike.

“But with the four other mass extinction events, one of the best explanations now is that these periods were preceded by an increase of volcanic activity, and that volcanic activity caused a change in ocean circulation.

“Just as we are seeing at a smaller scale today, huge parts of the ocean became anoxic at depth.

“The consequence of that is that you had increased amounts of rotten egg gas, hydrogen sulfide, going up into the atmosphere, and that is thought to be what may have caused some of these other extinction events.”

Professor Hoegh-Guldberg says up to 90 per cent of life has perished in previous mass extinctions and that a similar loss of life could occur in the next 100 years.

“We’re already having another mass extinction due to humans wiping out life and so on, but it looks like it could get as high as those previous events,” he said.

“So it’s the combination of this alteration to coastlines, climate change and everything, that has a lot of us worried we are going to drive the sixth extinction event and it will happen over the next 100 years because we are interfering with the things that keep species alive.

“Ocean ecosystems are in a lot of trouble and it all bears the hallmarks of human interference.

“We are changing the way the Earth’s oceans work, shifting them to entirely new states, which we have not seen before.”

He says while it is impossible to predict the future, in a century from now the world will be vastly different.

“A world without the Great Barrier Reef, where you don’t have the pleasure of going to see wild places any more,” he said.

“We might be able to struggle on with much lower population densities, but ultimately it won’t be the world we have today.

“The idea of walking in the Daintree will be a forgotten concept because these changes have occurred.”